critical conversation #3: 10 "mind-bombs" each

our third of five critical conversations was wednesday and was fantastic. everyone's research and work was outstanding and the conversations were all around great and gave us all a good boost of momentum to ride next semester.

the primary question which we all need to now focus on going forward is 'what's next?' our pieces have been set and its time to make some major moves.

the master of science in design research curriculum has certainly allowed the 10 project to grow faster than any of us could have expected. there is a steep learning curve which we all seem to have latched on to and the work is really beginning to move.

while there are many overlapping themes among the projects, each project seems to follow different and singular idea. this aspect is great because it allows us to relate to one another's projects, as well as help one another and build on each other's personalized and singular ideas.

our advisors (jason young and etienne turpin) have been unbelievably helpful thus far in helping us steer our work in a direction that is allowing us to maximize potential and begin to spatialize these sets of social, political, and economic bodies of research.

decoy cities

http://www.deconcrete.org/2011/12/02/a-paris-made-to-be-destroyed/

kudos to jonathan lejune for finding/posting this to twitter.

plans consisting of sham railways and sham factories. drawings for a city's false identity and counterfeit personality.

diggin it.

Digital/Manual: Crossings

the final drawing for Perry Kulper's Drawn Forth was digital/manual: crossings.
the project was a combination between digital work and manual work. not so much to represent something specific or have a clear-set agenda, but rather to gain a new tool set and way of working.



using my own digital files i put together a section of an undergraduate project, along with a collage of multiple photos, plans, and other digital images ghosted in the background.

for the manual, i wanted to really blur the definition of what constitutes manual. thus, much of the manual was hand drawn and scanned in. the spills, also from another past project, were actual spills of paint then placed into the background. the fence-like structures were hand-drawn and scanned in. the lines of flight above the building were a little more interesting in that they confuse the definition of digital/manual. for those, the section was printed up, transferred to drawing paper with acetone, the lines of flight then drawn on top of it, then scanned, and then superimposed onto the original digital scan, acetone transfer and all.

the final manual work was done with the placing of newspaper clippings to fit into the gaps of the lines of flight. while there was no specific reason for this since i was simply exploring new techniques, multiple reads were taken from the project which, while unintentional, was quite accurate.

the readings of this were that there was a theme of water and fishing in this drawing. having not presented it that way i found that interesting for multiple reasons. one was the fact that this base drawing of the section was a fishery project in sault ste marie, michigan. perhaps that led me to the placing of the underlying pattern of hand drawn fish skin onto the section, but the unintended reads were with the lines of flight and newspaper. the lines of flight reminding people of fishing line while the newspaper clippings reminded people of wrapping fish in a paper.

interesting takes on it. while it wasnt my intent, i suppose people will see what they want to see.
i enjoyed this project. it has always been fun for me personally going from manual to digital and back and forth again. definitely something i'll be incorporating in my future works.

im back...in the midst of the final push

been missing for a while. school taking a little more time than i expected.
ive got some documented work coming over the next few days/weeks.
T-4days till christmas break...
final push

coffee and techno

sitting in studio. drinking espresso and rocking out to deadmau5, daftpunk, and eric prydz. writing up ideas of where studio goes from here following last week's conversation. attempting to pair with and think up more subjects/institutions/territories.

thoughts thus far...

-pairing with the counterfeiter or the confidence man as a subject.

-thinking of schizophrenic mentality of both the user, but the space in which they occupy.

-the ghost shift-the third shift in which the factory producing the celebrity endorsed products shuts down and opens illegally to produce black market replicas

-temporality and dormancy of a space/person's actions

-illusion of trust generated by the a space

-this clinging to or borrowing from generates the idea of the parasitic relationship within certain aspects (carefully attempting to side-step my thesis here)

...

not sure if i need to begin to develop some agency within the work. but i certainly need to begin to stake some claims on behalf of the work and research and begin to develop a discursive relationship within the project.

i am interested in the parasitic and temporary architecture.

the museum is an interesting staging ground for that...the material is curated and assumed true. the counterfeit or temporary confidence mentality could insert itself into this scenario and partner with these ideologies.

more to come. thoughts still brewing.

not sure where it is all going just yet.

-b

villa savoye counterfeit?? certainly similar

stumbled on this while just looking at long island architecture firms.

interesting...

Curve House rooftop - montauk-moontalk - Very Modern Architecture

relational thinking (perry kulper's pencil)

perry uses this analogy often (i have now heard it multiple times, most recently in the MS_DR conversation earlier this week) to describe the meaning behind relational thinking and representational methodologies...

(paraphrasing)

"the pencil, when held up, can being to represent much more than what is seen in front of you. it represents education, industrialization, writing, penmanship, and creativity. but also at another level, i like to think what sorts of things make it possible? deforestation; history of writing; objects that dismantle and desegregate through time; the creation of the pencil through engineering and fabrication processes; educational and political hierarchies;temporalities through wear and use; ergonomics and aesthetics; the eraser represents modes of censorship and controlled culture. those things belong to me as systems and modes of thinking. the pencil is never hollowed out of attachments. when i re-situate it, that exuberance comes to the surface."

these ideas are concepts that many of the professors attempt to get us (especially in MS_DR) to think about and integrate into our work. so that the work begins to take on analogous thinking and approaches in finding new fields where are projects and ideas begin to situate themselves. they become new institutions, subjects, and territories for the work to place itself into.

draw.erase.remember finalized

drawing completed and finally scanned. levels adjusted somewhat, but idea remains clear. the erasure can be obviously seen on both sides now, as parts of both drawings have gone missing. the relational structure also becomes apparent in that characteristics find their way on to both sides of the drawing.

im interested in the idea of transformation through removal or disguising features. my current research has been invested in replicating, counterfeiting, and reproducing through representations and re-presentation. the act of removal or editing brings these ideas into a new perspective.

lost iterations...or hidden copies

kudos to a colleague of mine who stumbled upon these during our non-causal given research of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. unknown to many, the lost iterations of the home design.

favorite bullet points:

the stairs jetting out of the first floor in project two

the enclosed area on the third floor also in project two

the different garage iterations

the basement plan/section which i found out was real and generally unknown or untaught

HIGH HOUSES-lebbeus woods

seriously diggin this project (and all lebbeus woods works/drawings for that matter)

reclaiming materials and more interestingly, reclaiming airspace. integrating conflicting ideologies of flight versus structural hold to ground through tension cables.

interesting back/forth conversations happening in the work.

just putting off actual MS work...

http://architecturelab.net/2010/03/high-houses-by-lebbeus-woods/

great minds

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/peter-cook-the-london-eight/

lebbeus woods, cj lim, smout allen, pascal bronner, yousef al-mehdari...

some outstanding work on http://ethel-baraona.tumblr.com/post/472384023/sketchbook-prototypes-for-an-envirographic

stumbled upon a perry kulper article in there as well

awesome concept for concrete factory

A Daily Dose of Architecture: Half Dose #97: Concrete Factory

interesting new look to the standard concrete factory. while im not a big fan of the facade, the interior, now enclosed, is fantastic. the cat walks and ladders seem to be contained within an atmospheric shell.

id imagine this keeps the exterior clean as well...

but i couldnt want to be the one to have to clean those interior windows in a few months.

temporal morphology

project 2 for perry kulper's drawing course was temporal morphology. the project took an event or competitive video and formed a spatialization through drawing movements and aspects of the video.

my video was the overtime sequence of a collegiate wrestling match between the university of michigan and the university of minnesota. the takedown was the motion and process in focus (seen here).

the drawing, which is still in progress, takes into account, time, score, relational thinking and spacing, foot and head movement, control of match, forces and pressures, and even secondary components or actors within the scene such as the referees or spectators in the stands. i have approached this drawing as a construction document for the spatialization of the overtime period of a wrestling match. it carries loads of information and it's safe to say that this is a drawing that could always be pushed further.

(approximately half done)

this is a new technique and way of drawing that i have never been exposed to but i have found a deep love for it already. it has a steep learning curve and you begin to sense that every component of the drawing is as important as the last. the drawing has already become completely relational in the sense that it is thought out from the grid, to the structure of the forms, to the mapping of poche and graphics. it really has become a construction document for the structure of the takedown.

draw.erase.remember

the first project for drawn forth.

(Arch 509, Fall 2011, Prof. Perry Kulper)

the act of drawing 504 marks. all engineered and structured. the marks were generated along side a famous floor plan (Koolhaas's Villa Dall Ava in this case) to gain a relational structure between the two. the 504 marks were to be aligned, patterned, rhythmic, and repeated in sets of 21, 24 times.

once drawn, erase and remember take place on both halves of the drawing. the act of erasing our own work was a way of selecting and precisely acting on the drawing. covering, removing, or deleting in some way, becomes a form of design in itself as opposed to a form of destruction. one might begin to understand and read the act of erasure as a secondary layer of information in which we trump the drawing.

the remembering was a bit trickier...

this was meant to erase, but in some way protect or collect the marks.

i chose to layer on top of themarks with white gesso to create a ridged structure but also follow multiple edge conditions, thus mapping out strange formal conditions which were never there to begin with. these were generated through masking out bounds before erasing, therefore, the act of remembering was an obvious one; i used the same material that i had protected and created these edge conditions as the material to protect and 'remember' the marks below it.

Koolhaas's Villa Dall Ava

(http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18370&page=3)

the 504 marks before erase-remember occured.

note that all 24 sets are numbered as well.

MS_DR and Thoughts

gonna try this one more time..getting the blog up and going

we've got MS_DR on the table.

competition possibly with a former colleague.

looking for jobs to apply to for graduation.

following other blogs.

and just trying to get by...

here it goes